1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a character recognition system and more particularly to a system in which alpha numeric characters may be hand written, with such characters being machine readable and also capable of being read as ordinary appearing alpha numeric characters.
2. Description of the Prior Art
As data processing equipment becomes more common, and the range of applications of such equipment increases, the problem of data entry assumes a more important aspect. In the past, it has been conventional to enter data by means of a key-punch machine, by which punched cards are produced through the efforts of a key-punch operator. More recently, key-to-tape and key-to-disk systems have become available, but they also require the use of a human operator whose function is solely to convert data from human readable form to machine readable form. This technique of data entry, requiring the use of a translator, is an obstacle to achieve an efficient data entry, and also represents a source of errors and inaccuracies.
Some machines have been devised to optically read certain kinds of print or typing, but these machines are not able to read characters written by hand, because of the lack of uniformity and size of such characters.
A great variety of machine readable families of characters have been devised in the past. These characters, with few exceptions, have generally not been equally well adapted for recognition by the human operator and for machine reading. The more suitable a family of characters is for machine reading, the less feasible it is to provide for visual recognition of the characters. The exceptions consist of families having relatively few characters. Although the familiar magnetically coded set of characters includes aliphatic characters as well as numerals, the alphabetic characters are rarely used, both because of their lack of similarity to conventional printed characters, and because of the difficulties encountered in decoding such characters. Moreover, the magnetically coded set is not adapted for being written by hand without the use of machinery especially constructed for that purpose.
While it is possible to train an operator to recognize esoteric symbols and codes which are designed primarily to be machine readable, such arrangements are not suitable for use by relatively unskilled persons, but are effectively restricted to highly skilled personnel or else require complicated coding machines.
In Siegal U.S. Pat. No. 4,132,976, a family of characters is described which is both operator-readable and machine-readable. While the system in that patent is adequate for a variety of purposes, the use of the system involves some limitations which it is desirable to overcome.